Celebrations and commemorations of war

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I and commemorations of battles and victories in World War II have begun, in the lead up to the 70th anniversary next year. Roger Pulvers, a playwright, award winning translator and journalist, who lives both in Australia and Japan, talks about the fixation with the war experience that Australians have and how this leads to a glorification of our roles in these wars.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: And we continue the reflection with Roger Pulvers, playwright, award winning translator and journalist, especially in Japanese newspapers. He lives both here in Australia and in Tokyo. The point about war is that it shows how vile and depraved most of us can become, in the wrong circumstances. War can also bring out the most comradely, heroic and kind characteristics humans display. This is what Roger Pulvers has been mulling over, as we mark those terrible dates:

Roger Pulvers: This year the celebrations begin, in some countries that is. On July 28 we will mark the anniversary of the beginning, a century ago, of World War I. And already the commemorations of battles and victories in World War II have begun, in lead up, next year, to the seventieth anniversary of the end of hostilities in that war. In anticipation of the celebration of victory, and to mark the seventieth anniversary this year of the D-Day landings, an album of songs by Dame Vera Lynn is to be issued in the first week of June to remind us that the blitz had as many hits as it did misses.

As for us down here and far away, we are gearing ourselves up for celebrations too, starting with World War I. We are taught in our schools and reminded with constant retellings in the media that our sacrifices for King and Empire were the stuff of our coming of age. Back in 2005, the government of John Howard set aside 29.7 million dollars to make “values education a core part of schooling.” ABC News reported on August 24 of that year that Education Minister Brendan Nelson was taking a firm stand in the defence of Australian values. “Those who do not accept Australian values,” Nelson said, “should clear off.” He did not specify, however, in which direction this clearing off should take place.

The government at the time issued a document that featured Simpson and his donkey on the cover, the proposed symbol of our values-centred inculcation. Simpson is, of course, John Simpson Kirkpatrick, a hero of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in World War I. He carted wounded Aussie soldiers away from the front on his donkey.

No one would or should ever denigrate the courage of John Simpson, who, by the way, was an Englishman from County Durham, stretcher-bearer with the 3rd Field Ambulance, Australian Army Medical Corps in 1914 and 1915. But I find it bizarre that young Australians today are being told, as part of our national identity, to celebrate battles in which soldiers were needlessly maimed and slaughtered. Gallipoli had nothing to do with the defence of Australia, but was really just part of an imperial war waged against one dying empire (the Ottoman) to save another (the British).There is a debate just beginning to rage in the British media as to whether Britain's participation in World War I was at all necessary. This was a war of cruel futility waged by European elites who sacrified millions of lives in a last ditch attempt to preserve the privileges of inheritance. We, in Australia, provided shock troops for them, gaining nothing in return. It was not our war.

Again let me say that the bravery and sacrifices of the individual soldier should not be denigrated. The men who were sent thousands of kilometres away to fight another man's war are never to be blamed. They and their descendants have earned their place in the parade. But this does not mean that their heroism cannot be separated from the overall immorality and misinterpreted significance of the bigger battle. Soldiers do not die in vain. Their sacrifice in what may be a misguided cause can teach us the most important lesson: Never get involved in a dishonest war.

The plight of prisoners of war has been taken up in several recently published Australian novels. Among them, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North focuses on the lives of Australian POWs forced to work as slave labourers on the Thai-Burma Railway, while Thomas Keneally's Shameand the Captives and Christine Piper's After Darkness put enemy POWs, particularly Japanese ones, at the centre of their stories. More than 30 years ago, I myself published a novel in both English and Japanese, The Deathof Urashima Taro, that deals with the aftermath of guilt in the mind of Japanese prisoners incarcerated during the war at Cowra. All of these books are attempts to come to terms, in one way or another, with the traumas of confinement and how the past catches up with all of us. Perhaps the captive state is part of our story, and we understand it better than most.

In the interwar years Australians found themselves defending the British Empire in Asia, and Australia itself received what appeared to be an existential threat from Japanese forces beginning in the early months of 1942. Darwin and other towns were bombed, with considerable loss of life. We are taught that it was the Americans who came to Australia's rescue, with General Douglas MacArthur spearheading the attack on Japanese troops in New Guinea from headquarters first in Melbourne but later, and primarily, in Brisbane.

MacArthur made a hasty retreat from the Philippines in March 1942 to base himself in this country. His presence here was considered so significant that Prime Minister John Curtin shifted Australia's endearing loyalty to and dependence on an outside Big Brother from Britain to the United States. MacArthur used Australia as a staging ground for his military thrust against the Japanese in New Guinea. He cared little for the welfare of Australian troops and unashamedly failed to mention Australian losses in communiques to Washington, in that way aggrandizing what he preferred to view as American victories against the Japanese.

Did, in fact, the Americans save Australia from the Japanese, thus earning our undying, obsequious and largely unrequited loyalty? The answer is “No, they didn't.” Despite the early bombings in our far north and submarine attacks in Sydney Harbour, the plan to neutralise and occupy Australia was never taken seriously by the Japanese high command. Such a plan did exist, but it was not considered a viable strategic option and was abandoned early on in the war. What would they do with us once they had us? The tyranny of distance to our major cities and ports and our sheer size were our saving graces.

And yet it became important to the classes ruling us that the myth of being protected and preserved from harm by our bigger brothers be disseminated and reinforced as part of what ex-Prime Minister Howard called our core values. If our sacrifices weren't made in our own true interests and our role in battle not acknowledged, then to what end do we compromise our independence of thought and action for decades and decades to come? Why should we follow the United States into every single major war that country has waged since the end of World War II? Why should we subjugate our very identity to their versions of their national narratives?

The war in Vietnam is the most telling case in point. Not only did we participate in the cruel and illegal invasion of that country, but we also produced, in both Sydney and Perth, some of the chemicals for the herbicide known as Agent Orange that was sprayed throughout Vietnam, leading to an estimated 3 million people there whose health has been seriously affected by it. This was the kind of chemical warfare similar in some ways to that condemned by President Obama for its use in Syria. There are no red lines around us in our version of the past.

It is fair and fitting, however, to separate the bravery of the individual soldier from the immorality of war. The soldier, particularly the conscripted one, has little or no choice in the context of the fulfilment of his role. And this applies not only to countries that we have considered allies, but to our enemies as well. Having lived most of my life in Japan, I have felt great pity for the ordinary Japanese who were sent to other countries in Asia and the Pacific to fight a brutal war that their emperor and his fanatic military subordinates forced on the nation.

Several years ago I wrote the script for a Japanese feature film called Ashita e no Yuigon, the English title of which is Best Wishesfor Tomorrow. It tells the story of General Okada Tasuku of the Tokai Army in the region around Nagoya. General Okada's men captured some American air force servicemen who, toward the very end of the war, had parachuted out of planes that were bombing the city of Nagoya and indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians. The American servicemen were given a hasty and slipshod trial and executed. After the war, General Okada and his men were put on trial in Yokohama; and General Okada himself was sentenced to death by the American military tribunal in that city. In writing the script of a film based on fact together with director Koizumi Takashi, I wanted to tell the story from both sides. Both sides were guilty of crimes against humanity. The indiscriminate bombing of virtually every Japanese city killed hundreds of thousands of civilians; and that bombing culminated in a holocaust caused by the dropping of atomic bombs in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It has become part of our American-Anglo-Australian narrative that these bombings were necessary, despite what is euphemistically called collateral damage, to bring a swift end to the war. And yet, the truth is that they were unjustifiable war crimes against a country that was suing for peace for months, arguing that the only obstacle to an end to belligerency was the acceptance of the emperor's inviolability after the war. It is ironical that after Japan's unconditional surrender, it was the Americans who insisted upon retaining the emperor as an untarnished symbol of the post-war state.

There is a famous story, which has been filmed several times in Japan, called I Want to be a Shellfish … Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai. It depicts the life of a barber living in a small town on the island of Shikoku. He is drafted into the army and forced to bayonet an Allied soldier. Ordinary soldiers in the Japanese army were brutalized beyond imagination; and insubordination was met with torture and/or execution. After the war the barber is arrested by American occupation soldiers, put on trial for war crimes and hanged. Just before his execution, he writes a letter to his family telling them that if he is ever reborn he does not want to be a human being again but rather a shellfish that lives at the bottom of the sea.

Soldiers on every side of a battle are often victims of the perverse mythologizing and dreaded machinations of their nation's leaders and other self-styled pillars of the community. As such, it is right and proper that we honour the soldiers on all sides at times of commemoration. At the same time, we must not succumb to twisted versions of our national narrative. Perhaps the recent fiction centering on the stories of prisoners of war from various nationalities is an attempt to confront the real truths behind our narrative.

When it comes to Australia, if we do not recognise some of our sacrifices as the subordinate and ill-advised result of manipulation by those we still view as our protectors, in other words, if we continue to see our own history as a derivation of someone else's, then we will forever limit ourselves to aspirations of being “as good as,” never able to better ourselves in our region of the world, never extricate ourselves from the shadows of the history of others.

These are the thoughts that occur to me as we enter our two years of commemoration. We must commemorate the past. But, if we are to have our own identity, we must define it wisely.

Robyn Williams: Which I suppose is why these commemorations can be so significant. This was writer and translator Roger Pulvers, who is also an academic in Tokyo, as well as living in Australia. Next week we bring you Anthropocene: An age defined by humans.